The Fall of Saints (18 page)

The town could as easily have gone under the name Condom City. From the shopfronts on either side of the main street hung condom posters. Not just the shops on the main street but the whole town: Every wall was pasted with bills advertising Proctor condoms. Looking at the long-haul trucks parked along the roads, with young half-naked girls circling around them, I could guess why the condom was the dominant decor in this town built during the colonial era and which, by all indications, seemed to have resisted growth. The condom was the only sign of modernity, but then it also brought to mind the modernity of HIV.

I was actually happy to step into the Supa Duka, if only to escape the dust and wind. My eyes were burning and felt as if someone were pushing little pebbles into them. But once I was inside the premises, the prospect of what I was about to do hit me. What was the difference between me and the half-naked girls circling the trucks? If they could escape the virus by using the condom, their ordeal was brief if brutish, and I supposed one could always say, “No, not tonight.” But these others had to carry the pain of humiliation through nine months and then a lifetime of scars of the body and spirit. I was not here to play philosopher but to probe, I reminded myself. How far was I willing to go? The question loomed large. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t planned this through. I had to proceed cautiously—ensuring, for instance, suppression of any trace of an American accent—but then I remembered that every youth in Kenya, even those who had never left the country, tried versions of Americanism. As for insemination, I was well aware that that they did not do the operation on the first meeting. But suppose they had changed their routine? I would have to insist that I had understood it differently or fight my way out, I told myself, recalling my training in martial arts.

The doors were open, so I stepped right in to face a balding man who sat on the counter reading a magazine. It looked like a normal general shop with all manner of items, mostly over-the-counter drugs, on half-empty shelves. I got confused and felt foolish, especially when the man looked at me from head to toe without moving.

“Daktari. Are you the doctor?” I asked timidly.

He rolled his eyes and pointed toward a blue metal door past the counter and went back to his magazine, which, I noted as I passed, was upside down. I took a deep breath and turned the doorknob. The door swung open, revealing a blue room. It held the smell I always associated with hospitals and medicine. There was nobody behind the reception desk. I heard some voices. When I stepped closer to listen, my heart was pounding. The voices and movement in the other room got louder, and before I could make out what was going on, a woman wearing a dark green uniform walked in.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Wakitabu sent me here. My name is Amina.”

“Your ID, please,” she said as she stepped behind the reception desk.

“ID? I don’t have one. I mean, er, I didn’t bring one. Wakitabu didn’t tell me to carry one.”

“You need a man to tell you to carry your ID? You women . . . Now, how in the world am I going to know if you are the Amina you say you are?”

“Why don’t you call Wakitabu?”

“Go home and come back tomorrow. With your ID,” she said without looking up.

I started to walk out, but at the door, I heard a man’s voice call out, “Simama!” I turned around to face a man with a huge Afro, looking for all the world as if he had stepped out of the sixties. His long white coat fell over brown corduroy bell-bottoms and a white turtleneck. A stethoscope hung from his neck. He introduced himself as Daktari, the Swahili name for doctor. “Bring the ID next time,” he said to me.

He asked me to sit down on a wooden bench in the reception area while he remained standing in front of me. “So, Amina, why do you want to do this?”

“I need the money. I don’t want to have to join the ranks of those hovering around the truck drivers.”

“Well, you will certainly make more here than those little whores. They give women a bad name.” He said this with arrogance.

“How much will I get?” I was trying to sound more confident than I felt.

“Didn’t Wakitabu tell you?”

“No, he said I should discuss it with Alaska,” I lied, to see if I could get more information.

“He told you that? Alaska?”

“The papers that I signed said Alaska,” I answered vaguely.

“Wakitabu will bring your money to you. I don’t discuss money,” he said, and I made a mental note that he had not elaborated on Alaska. “But I can tell you this, if they are twins, you get double. So pray for twins,” he said without any emotion.

“And if I get six? Wakitabu suggested eight.”

“The more you carry, the more you get,” he said, “but let’s take it step by step. Are you ready?” He got up and motioned for me to follow him, which I did through the back door.

“Are there side effects or complications that I need to be aware of?” I asked. “I hear that the uterus can collapse . . . pro—”

“Prolapsed uterus,” he said, proud to show his knowledge. “Rare, but it can happen. Everything has risks.”

“I want to do this until I meet my needs. One woman told me that once I start, I can’t get out of it. Am I in it for life?”

“You sure do ask a lot of questions. But we are professionals, my dear; don’t you worry your head about it.” He looked at me quizzically. “It’s all in your contract,” he added as an afterthought.

“Wakitabu took it with him.”

“It’s safe. But it does not deal with illnesses.”

I felt prickly heat under my arms. As I reached up to ward off the itch, I realized my hands were shaky. I had to keep my composure. I looked at everything, trying to make mental notes without appearing unduly curious. Finally, he led me through yet another door into a huge room filled with all sorts of medical equipment. In the middle of the room was a bed with overhead lighting. A state-of-the-art theater in Donkey City? Betty and Philomena had not been hallucinating.

A woman in a white coat who I guessed was the assistant stood by a bed at the far end of the room. The table seemed reserved for birthing. The man gave me blue overalls to put on. He pointed at a curtain and told me to change in there.

My heart raced. What if they knew I was Mugure and they were toying with me? What if I went on the examining bed and they injected me with something that induced permanent sleep? My son. Kobi. Would I ever see Kobi again?

“Everything, your jeans, remove everything,” the woman was saying.

“You may also want to use the bathroom before heading out this way,” shouted the doctor, pointing at a small door on my right.

The minute he said so, I felt the need to go badly. I half ran into the bathroom, a small clean space that smelled of disinfectant. My mind was racing. How was I going to get out of this now? I had made out okay so far, but I needed an exit strategy. Damn, I should have thought of this before. No time to panic . . . think! I felt so much freer after peeing. I washed my hands and walked back to face the consequences, wringing my hands to dry them.

“Relax, today is just the examination,” Daktari assured me as he gestured to the bed with his gloved hands. “When you come back next month, we will plant the seeds.”

He and his assistant were now in scrubs and face masks. The operating room was lit more brightly, and the temperature seemed cooler.

As I climbed on the bed, I tried to read the doctor’s eyes to catch signs of anything sinister. My body was screaming at me to run, but I willed myself to put my feet in the stirrups and lie down, readying myself for the ordeal.

The doctor pulled out a handheld device that resembled a microphone, and poured some lubricant on it. I had been to enough clinics to know that he was going to do a transvaginal ultrasound. As I watched the doctor get ready to insert the gadget in my privates, I tried to think other thoughts, which had worked for me in other clinics, but I could not escape the reality: This doctor probing my uterus was a criminal.

When I heard the doctor say, “You can get dressed,” I rushed to put on my clothes. The nurse tried to explain something about the next visit, but I could hardly wait to get out. I felt as if I would suffocate. I longed to breathe the air that I had so detested two hours earlier.

I welcomed the dust, the donkey carts, the shit, the braying. I could not understand why there was so much secrecy surrounding the Supa Duka, unless it was a cover for something that embraced more than the mass production of children for adoption. Then I heard a commotion from the market square. I was so glad to see so many people that I hastened toward them as if they had come out in big numbers for me. “What is going on here?” I asked a woman.

“Husband and wife are fighting over their kids,” she said.

I stood on tiptoe and saw a man with a stick in his right hand, fuming with anger. Standing in front of him was a white man shielding a woman. The woman would hurl a few choice insults at her fuming husband and then duck behind the gray-haired white protector, who spoke fluent Kiswahili, trying to calm the irate husband, in which he had succeeded, because husband and wife were now talking civilly.

“Who is that?” I asked a woman, referring to the white man.

“That is Father Brian,” she said as if this were an everyday scene in the community. “Very nice man. When he is not teaching cricket, he runs a food program for children. When we are in trouble with our men, we run to him,” she said, and laughed.

I felt like I was staring at a well-known character who had emerged from a novel to walk among the living. I edged closer to take a good look at the man who had brought down the Alternative Clinics and even forced the hand of the Vatican, the visionary founder of Alaska Enterprises whose tentacles had reached my house in the Bronx. What would happen if I were to walk over and demand that he explain himself? How a piece of paper with “Alaska Enterprises” on it came to be in my husband’s office and his car? But I had my cover to protect.

I started walking toward the bus stop, lost in thought. Then I felt a presence walking beside me and turned my head. It was Father Brian.

“What a surprise, Father,” I said, stopping to face him. “It’s nice of you to bring domestic peace.”

“It’s my calling,” he said. “But I sometimes bring war. Are you American?”He was so incredibly soft-spoken, so soothing, that I almost forgot the gravity of the question, the answer, and the situation.

“No,” I said, smiling.

“He sent you to snoop, right?” he asked.

“Who? What are you talking about?” I asked.

He dug into his pocket and removed a piece of paper that he handed to me. I unfolded it and suddenly felt vulnerable. I was staring at a photo of Zack and me outside Shamrock on our last visit. The day of the suited gunman. My heart skipped a beat. I stepped back.

“You don’t want die for another,” he intoned. “Christ did that for us all. Tell him he can hide behind your skirts, but he can’t hide from me.”

I was looking down and around, unsure what to do or say. When I looked back in the priest’s direction, he had vanished back among his adoring crowd. I hastily walked to the bus stop and got inside the Nairobi-bound
matatu
.

When I got to Jane’s house, it was early evening. I had to speak to Jane or Wainaina. The coincidence of my having told Ben that I was in Kenya and then finding out Father Brian knew me was too much to take. I recalled my meeting with Ben at Kennedy. He knew about the altercation with the suited gunman outside Shamrock. Now Father Brian had a picture of the same event.

The door to Jane’s bedroom was wide open. I walked in to find Wainaina’s arms wrapped around Jane. Wow. Jane and Wainaina?

“Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude,” I said, and before they recovered their composure, I retreated into the kitchen and started making coffee. I was not sure how I felt. I recalled the close encounters between Wainaina and me, but I got ahold of myself. Jane was my best friend, after all. Right now there were other urgent matters.

Jane and Wainaina joined me in the kitchen. I told them about the clinic and about Brian and his chilling message.

“This is getting creepy,” Wainaina said.

“And dangerous,” Jane added. “The good news is that Betty has texted Wangeci’s number.”

The next morning I called Ben, just to know where he was. I then called Zack. Still no answer.

I called Wangeci and set up a meeting at her place the same day.

18

J
ane dropped off Wainaina and me at Kenyatta Avenue, where we hired a taxi. Maina, the driver, was a chubby fellow who claimed that Nairobi would become a huge parking lot if nothing were done to ease the traffic jam. Talking all the while, he used back streets to get us onto Limuru Road in good time.

In Tigoni, we were welcomed by spacious houses with well-manicured gardens surrounded by carefully trimmed hedges and driveways lined with palm trees. We passed by Tigoni Dam and pulled up at gate 5 on Kilesho Drive. The black iron gate with indecipherable artwork was attached to a high brick wall that ran across the curbside. Maina rang the bell, and after a while, we heard a clanking noise. The electric gate begun to slide open, disappearing into the wall to reveal a massive gray house surrounded by a lush green lawn.

We left Maina in the car outside. Wainaina and I walked toward the door through a veranda filled with potted plants. A girl, about eight years old, welcomed us into the house and led us to the living room. Something about her looked familiar, but I was not able to put my finger on it. The decor was appalling: Every manner of couch in gray and blue filled the otherwise spacious room. Two women sat near the middle of the room, and as soon as they saw us, they started to rise. The older of the two was heavyset. She must have weighed about three hundred pounds, and she panted with the attempt to rise.

“You don’t have to get up,” I said, walking toward them.

“My child, I have to greet my visitors,” she said. Using her hands on the couch armrests to balance herself, she was on her feet finally.

A younger woman who turned out to be Wangeci walked toward us as well.“Hey, come and greet our visitors,” she called to the little girl, who was standing behind Wainaina. “This is Mwihaki, my other daughter’s little girl.”